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Vehicle Handbook $29.99
Average Rating:4.4 / 5
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Vehicle Handbook
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Vehicle Handbook
Publisher: Mongoose
by David T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/23/2021 17:16:07

This contains the Moongoose Traveller vehicle design rules and a selection of vehicles at various TL's.

I must say that it is pricey for the content, but if you want to design your own vehicles it's a must have.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Vehicle Handbook
Publisher: Mongoose
by A customer [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/05/2018 20:05:29

Detailed enough, there is a multi turreted tank, I would have liked an anti grav battleship. Prefer the detail of TNE and Classic Traveller. A good product with many options if you like this system.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Vehicle Handbook
Publisher: Mongoose
by Jens G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/03/2017 14:56:01

Excellent purchase, I need more. Give me like ... steam punk airships and stuff



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Vehicle Handbook
Publisher: Mongoose
by Megan R. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 02/27/2017 07:43:16

Spacecraft are all very well, but once you reach your destination, how do you get around? Having the appropriate land, sea and air vehicles can go a long way to making other planets feel real, alien, exotic... or whatever impression you are trying to get across. Vehicles can also be a source of adventure: perhaps it is hard to get hold of one when you need it, or maybe offworlders have to use a specific form of transport. Indeed, they can end up being the adventure: many years ago, a spectacular Traveller adventure was spawned at a Games Fair convention in the UK when a bunch of players decided that they weren't staying around for the riot that had broken out and stole a groundcar... unfortunately none of them knew how to drive it, and their exploits on the way back to the starport became the stuff of legend!

The Introduction lays out the purpose of the book clearly. The design system is simple and straightforward, but fits in with everything else so far published. The emphasis is on what the vehicle can do, how fast it goes and what it can carry. That's what you need to know as far as game mechanics are concerned... most of the rest is window-dressing.

Chapter 1: New Rules provides some additional rules that you will need to make it all work. There are notes about resupply and maintenance, sensors, detection of vehicles and even things like can the vehicle tow something else (or indeed, be towed)... and of course the pleasures and perils of the used vehicle market! They also may be specifically designed for a purpose: combat, say, or off-road operation.

We then move on to Chapter 2: Vehicle Design. It's a seven-stage process, very streamlined, and once you are used to it you can crank out new vehicles in a matter of minutes. Actual construction times and costs are likely to be a little more, though there are advantages to mass-production. Most parties will be looking to buy (or rent) rather than make their own vehicles from scratch, however. Starting with chassis type and tech level (stage 1), you then decide the number of 'spaces' the vehicle has (stage 2, which determines the basic parameters for the vehicle), add weapons and armour if required (stage 3), customise it if you want to (stage 4), work out how many crew are needed and passengers can be carried (stage 5), allocate cargo space (stage 6), and finalise your design (stage 7)... and you're done! This is a toolkit rather than hard and fast rules, and the Referee is always at liberty to deviate if desired. An example (a fairly ordinary-looking ground vehicle, a rugged van basically) is worked through in detail to demonstrate the process, and the next four chapters go into more detail about chassis types, armour, weapons, and customisation.

Grouped by basic chassis type - light ground vehicle through gravitics-powered and unpowered ones, then boats, submersible and aircraft - there are loads of options to help you come up with exactly what you need. You can even have ornithopters and walkers if you want. Armour is generally a case of strategically-placed plating, then on to weapons, as many and as varied as you can imagine. Weapons can be mounted in various manners, and a wide range of generic ones are provided... and then comes customisation. Your imagination is pretty much the limit, although there are suggestions galore and an in-character advertisement for a vehicle design consultancy!

Next, things get a bit exotic with Chapter 7: Biotech. This may or may not be commonplace in your universe, or it may be very localised. The chapter assumes that it is rare but possible, and assumes it needs at least a TL10 world to create biotech vehicles, but that the biotech vehicles themselves operate two tech levels lower. If biotech is commonplace, you can ignore these restrictions. Again, maintenance and repair may be problematic if biotech is unusual, but straightforward if such vehicles are readily available. Some exotic versions of chassis types and weapons are provided, but feel free to go wild!

This is followed by Chapter 8: Drones. These can be remotely piloted or autonomous, and there's an interesting sidebar about whether you should use robot rules rather than these drone ones to create them. The conclusion (apart from leaving it open to the Referee to decide) is that a drone is specifically an unmanned vehicle, a robot can do most anything. Perhaps drones are a subset of robots? (Maybe I should ask the computing ethics class I'm teaching after lunch!)

If your head is swimming with all the choices, never fear... the final section is Jayne's Guide to Vehicles of Charted Space, a vast array of pre-generated vehicles of all sorts that you can use straight off... or customise a bit, first. Each one comes with a description, cost, appropriate statistics and an illustration. Conveniently, each occupies a single page so PDF users may print off just the pages they need. There does seem to be rather a lot of military vehicles, fine if you are equipping some mercenaries but of less use if you've just landed and want to go sightseeing!

Overall, a robust system which meshes well with the rest of this ruleset... but in some ways a little uninspired. Consider the science fiction books you've read or films you have seen. Describe the vehicles in them... sometimes troubling to codify everything bogs you down. OK, so you need to know how fast it goes and what it can carry, how much damage its weapon does... as for the rest, let your imagination run riot. This system will let you slot in whatsoever numbers and game mecahnics you need.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Vehicle Handbook
Publisher: Mongoose
by Christopher R. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/16/2017 20:01:24

Lots of great options. From bicycles to massive anti-grav battleships, if you can invision it you can build it. The system is easier to follow then the one for spaceships (High Guard), but then again a minivan isn't as complicated as a starship.

My main complaint is the example vehicles don't go tell you how many spaces are being used for crew/passengers. The book suggests 1–5 (or more) per person, but the exact number isn't given for the examples.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Vehicle Handbook
Publisher: Mongoose
by Philip G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/11/2017 14:54:17

This is an interesting supplement for a few different reasons. First is that it provides players and referees alike a good amount of information concerning vehicles in the near future and how to go about modifying and creating your own. The rules provided in the beginning are based on a system of “spaces” that can be allocated different things from cargo to weapons to travellers to armor. The number of spaces a vehicle can have is based on the general chassis/design. A light ground vehicle for example can have between 1-20 spaces whereas a ship would have 50+ spaces. The spaces determine how much room you have for “Stuff”, the base cost of the vehicle, and how many tons it takes to freight your design in the cargo of another vessel. Those with high guard (or other similar games with starship design) will feel right at home with trying to optimize things and keep them under a size and cost. After reading through the book I fired up my favorite spreadsheet software to keep track of costs and sizes and went about designing an armed six-seater vehicle. The process was pretty straightforward except when things bog down calculating the exact cost of the “spaces” of a vehicle, especially when armor comes into play. Some things like camo are X cost per space, whereas some things like armor are a percent increase per space. The book makes it clear that you always go back to the first value when calculating, but it does get a bit messy. Options wise there are plenty of things to do with your vehicles and you can construct pretty much anything from a TL 3 sailing vessel to a TL 10 hover tank to a TL 15 bioweapon-sporting submarine reasonably quickly. Things with armor and multiple “plusses and minuses” to agility, speed, fuel economy, fuel capacity, cargo storage, personnel capacity, and ammo storage can get a little much to manage, but it’s all doable and it gets easier as you run through a few different designs. The book also makes it clear that at the end of the day you should use whatever makes sense to you regardless of what the rules say to do. There are even suggestions on handling cheaper mass-produced vehicles as needed. The second half of the text is a guide to a bunch of standard vehicles that you can expect to see in a traveler game from a P-51 (cunningly called the Vanguard) to a Nuclear Machinegun toting drone. Some of the images that the authors chose to go with the vehicle designs remind me of 1990s adventure game graphics where they show pre-rendered (in glorious 8-bit color) 3d models that were never quite right. It’s not a bad thing as this is just the basis for a paper and pencil RPG, but sometimes my players like looking through these books as if they were fashion magazines for the latest model. From an editing standpoint, the book is fairly well done but it needs a bit of love from a spelling perspective as there are some glaring typos that seem out of place in a modern, slickly produced document. The charts are easy to read and the authors were smart to include references directly to the core rulebook, high guard, and supply catalog as needed. The PDF runs well on my tablet as well as desktop computer. All in all, it’s a pretty solid handbook for designing your own vehicles for use in a traveller game. The provided examples are great for modifying or as a basis for your own designs. There are little things that bother me from a mechanic perspective such as sensors and how modern electronic warfare is conducted, but I can just imagine how that would needlessly complicate things to have specific in game rules controlling them. Content wise 4/5. It’s good and gets my imagination going without burdening things too much. My ultra-modern T-80U with ERA and laser point defense will certainly slow my players down.
Value wise 2/5. It is far too expensive for just a PDF, and it’s pushing it for a softcover. It would have been great had they included a page for say "light tank" and then showed how it changes over time across new technology levels with appropriate graphics. 50-60 pages of those kinds of things would have been great. The book also misses a few modern technologies such as missile/laser warning systems, gunfire locators or even ballistic tracking radars to make it easier to locate hidden attackers. Get it if you want to design your own vehicles and get an idea of extra vehiclular options, otherwise the ones in the core book plus a little imagination here or there will satisfy most of your gaming needs. Now if you'll excuse me I have to finish my horse-drawn planetary defense motorcycle design...



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
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